Trotsky, Lenin, and the October Revolution (90th Anniversary) - Introduction

The year 2007 marks the 90th anniversary of probably the greatest event which almost shook the foundations of Capitalism and taught us a lesson that anything is possible to attain the goals of Marxism. The two primary engineers are definitely Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This doesn’t mean we exclude the role of the Bolshevik key figures such as Kamenev,Bukharin, Zinoviev, Radek, Rakovsky, Reed, Riazanov, Kollontai, Sverdlov (another details on Sverdlov by Trotsky, and a whole list of never ending figures. Another dimension of course is the great sacrifices the proletariat paid for to achieve equality in 1917. This of course would make couple of Stalinists angry (Lebanon and abroad), but I will like to announce the introduction of October Revolution (90th Anniversary) series to explain for the Lebanese left what has happened in the past and how we can on Lebanese and International scale build to the next level of activism and establishing a Proletariat movement. After all, the only real war that exists in the 21st century is the class war. There are no Nationalistic wars, such wars are conducted for business reasons.

The preferred references to understand in a simplified form the October revolution are:
The Prophet Armed (Isaac Deutcher), Lenin and Trotsky: For What they Stood For (Alan Woods and Ted Grant), Bolshevism: The Road to the Revolution (Alan Woods), 10 Days that Shocked the World (John Reed), The History of the Russian Revolution (Leon Trotsky), , and almost never ending wonderful references on the subject. I would like to comment on two people who shamefully tried to distort history as it happened: Stalin and Kautsky. Stalin advocated his Russian Nationalism which he linked to Lenin and crowned himself as “Defender of Leninism”, while Kautsky justified himself by deviating from the path of “emancipation from below” and tried to eliminate the importance and lessons of the October Revolution (Check Lenin's Book). I consider the latter more dangerous than the former. Stalinism died with Stalin, and what we still have are minor residues slowly moving to capitalism. The Latter is more dangerous because he opened a path for right-wingers to become active under the banner of the left. The Left of course, such as the current bankrupt Social Democrats globally, would be tempted to follow the easy way to solve the problems of the working class by allying with the right-wing. We see this with the Democratic Left Movement, while the Lebanese Communist Party justifies how a Stalinist party would behave in the absence of Moscow. All of these lessons will pop up in the October revolution, along the importance of Internationalism, Class Struggle, Historical Materialism, Dialectical Materialism, Marxist Economics, Science of Revolutions and its ethics, and Marxist Sociology.

I hope you will enjoy those series, and sadly I wish I can just write down everything I know on the topic, but that would require a whole set of remarkable books that will never end.


MFL